Contingency

[brin_bellway]

[fairly mild cw: illness, apocalypse]


You know those discussions about warning signs on radioactive-waste storage sites where people talk about how difficult it is to come up with symbolism that unknown future cultures will reliably understand? Like, never mind whether they'll *believe* you when you tell them to flee, even just *conveying* that message is incredibly difficult.

I think about those discussions every time I look at my phone's notification bar at home and see this symbol:



If you show that symbol to inhabitants of the year 2018, I'll bet most of them would say it means "sun". If you show it to *every* 2018 native and even *one* of them successfully interprets it as "coronavirus", I will eat my fucking hat.


(This is the expanded version of the notification:



That is to say, my Bluetooth is off so it can't handshake with the phones around me (plus my GPS is off, which due to limitations in Android Bluetooth firmware-or-somesuch also interferes with handshaking; the app does not actually have location permissions). I turn Bluetooth/GPS off at home because it's not helpful there. Honestly, exposure tracing probably isn't helpful at all given my current lifestyle and the high threshold for registering an exposure: it's really intended for public transit and the like. The only people outside my household I ever go within 2m of for longer than 15 minutes(!) are my co-workers, and I expect I would find out if one of them tested positive.)

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(edit: part 2)

Comments

[grayestofghosts]

I think I live in a different country to you where that app does not exist. To me, it still looks like a sun. In fact, it almost looks identical to the "sunny day" image on my weather app -- so it looks like, from a semiotics perspective, that's a pretty poorly constructed symbol, thought that may be a limitation of the medium.

One advantage the people in the future will have over the people of 2018 is that radioactivity has already been discovered, at least.

Like, the thing is, what I think the semiotics people get wrong is the concept in the future that they will at once have 1) great ability to move earth and concrete to get to these underground chambers where the radioactivity is stored and 2) will have completely forgotten what radioactivity is. There is this idea that once history is lost it will be retrieved in a linear manner the same direction we did it. And, like, I don't think that's necessarily true.

[brin_bellway]

This is from the Canadian app.

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I'm not super hooked into the radioactivity-semiotics debates, but the stuff that gets through to me has never been about mining: it always seemed to have an assumption that radioactive sites would be dangerous *at the surface* or at the very least inside accessible caves.

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Also: coronaviruses, in general, were known in 2018. There's a reason it's called SARS-CoV-*2*, after all. (Plus MERS, plus four types of common-cold coronavirus.) Indeed, if you look at 2010s lists from public-health officials of "types of viruses most likely to spawn a plague", coronaviruses are generally near the top of the list.

[grayestofghosts]

Yeah, I'm not in Canada, so I've never seen this app. Sorry if my comment was kind of disjointed and unintelligible -- I've been looking back into the radioactivity fuckery research again. Maybe we've been seeing the same info on semiotics.

From what I've read about semiotics it always does seem to be that the radioactive material has been made, at least at the time it was put there, inaccessible. At least from the sites I've read about there's always a timeframe that the sites will be used and then at some point sealed off. I'm not sure why a site wouldn't be sealed off at some point unless the use of a site was interrupted and therefore it was never "finished," I guess. Possibly what they're anticipating is that these sites won't be sealed and that radioactive materials will likely over the course of 10,000 years leak into surrounding soil and groundwater, becoming a problem anyway? They try to choose places and methods to prevent that but future-proofing is an impossible endeavor.

Coronaviruses may have already been around and public health officials may have known that they were likely to cause a plague but it's still a *novel* coronavirus for a reason. The dangers of radioactivity are, at this point, well-known, and that knowledge is written in blood. I mean, I know these semiotic people actually working on this know way more than me but it just seems like a fruitless endeavor, that it's probably human nature that if this knowledge was lost it would need to be written out in blood *again*, but that people would, probably, pick up on it relatively quickly. There's some proposals to leave the sites unmarked and that sounds like it might be the safest option.

But that's kind of off to the side of your original point (I just think your posts are interesting, sorry if I'm babbling). I think my original point was that, as someone who is steeped in a COVID-19 restricted life who is not familiar with the app you use, I can't tell what that symbol is supposed to be without it being explained that it's like, a super simplified magnified coronavirus. It's just not a well-designed symbol for that purpose.

[contrarianarchon]

Yeah ditto with "that symbol is not in absence of the specific app that uses it, immediately legible as a coronavirus thing without additional context".

(And yeah I've always seen people doing radioactivity stuff thinking about it on the scale where *geology* is an important factor here, so I had thought they were worried about, like, freak earthquakes or faults defying the long odds or leaks caused by sheer age of the systems at hand even when the systems are designed to age into being less accessible rather than more.

Also worth noting is that there was def a window of time between "willing technologically speaking to dig deep mines to get shiny stuff" and "Understood radioactivity" and given that this window contains a industrial revolution inside it, it might take a lot longer for our post-apocalyptic fellows to move through that era because they don't get the economic freebie of fossil fuels? And maybe a sufficiently stupid breach could actually wreck a bunch of land?

That said I think honestly this is one of those cases where the problem is so widely spread because it's fascinating and wonderful rather than because the stakes are very high? Like I'm not sure there are huge flocks of full time radioactive semiotics people working on the problem (and if there are, they're probably regular semiotics people doing a research project or regular radioactivity people doing a side bit), it's just that it captures a lot of people's imagination so we're all kinda thinking about it all the time?)